OpenAI, a leading force in artificial intelligence, has reached a significant milestone by surpassing 400 million weekly active users as of February. This marks a 33% increase from 300 million users in December, demonstrating substantial growth despite heightened competition from emerging open-source models like DeepSeek. The company's impressive roster of enterprise customers includes industry giants such as Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna, and T-Mobile, underscoring its expanding influence and adoption.
OpenAI's Chief Operating Officer, Brad Lightcap, attributed this growth to the increasing demand and perceived value of AI tools across various sectors. He noted that the uptick in weekly active users mirrors the typical buying cycle and learning process involved in scaling an enterprise business. Lightcap emphasized the parallels between AI usage and the cloud services pioneered by Amazon Web Services two decades ago, suggesting that AI will become an indispensable part of business operations.
"There's an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable." – Brad Lightcap
The company's developer traffic has surged, doubling in the past six months and quintupling for its "reasoning" model, o3. This surge is indicative of the growing interest and reliance on AI for complex problem-solving and decision-making processes. Moreover, OpenAI now boasts 2 million paying enterprise users, a figure that has nearly doubled since September. Employees frequently leverage ChatGPT for personal use, often recommending its implementation to their organizations.
"There's a buying cycle there, and a learning process that goes into scaling an enterprise business." – Brad Lightcap
Despite its rapid expansion, OpenAI faces legal challenges, most notably from billionaire Elon Musk. Musk has filed a lawsuit against the company for breach of contract amidst its transition to a for-profit model. Earlier this month, Musk, alongside a group of investors, offered to purchase the nonprofit's assets for $97.4 billion. However, OpenAI's Chairman Bret Taylor has affirmed that the company is "not for sale," while OpenAI's legal representatives have dismissed Musk's much-publicized bid as not being a genuine offer.
"We try to be very transparent about where we stand on all of this. (Musk) is a competitor. He's competing. It's an unorthodox way of competing." – Brad Lightcap
In addition to these legal entanglements, OpenAI has garnered significant financial backing from major players in the tech industry. Microsoft has invested billions into the company, bolstering its resources and capabilities. Meanwhile, SoftBank is reportedly nearing completion of a $40 billion investment deal that could value OpenAI at approximately $300 billion.
"AI is going to be like cloud services. It's going to be something that you can't run a business that ultimately is not really running on these very powerful models underneath the surface." – Brad Lightcap
As AI continues to gain traction in mainstream consciousness, competitors like DeepSeek highlight the transformative power and public interest in these technologies. According to Lightcap, such developments would have been unimaginable just two years ago.
"DeepSeek is a testament to how much AI is like entered the public consciousness in the mainstream — it would have been unfathomable two years ago." – Brad Lightcap